Talks

Rasmus Lerdorf is known for having gotten the PHP project off the ground in 1995 and has contributed to a number of other open source projects over the years. He is currently an infrastructure architect at Yahoo! He was born in Greenland, grew up in Denmark and Canada and has a Systems Design engineering degree from the University of Waterloo.

This talk will focus on the architecture, performance and security of Web 2.0 applications. The Web is inherently simple and lends itself well to highly scalable fast Web applications. But, if you get the architecture wrong, it can have disastrous performance consequences which will be illustrated with tools such as strace, callgrind and xdebug. Many of the currently popular frameworks do not do a very good job of encouraging people to write fast applications choosing developer productivity over end-user page latencies. There are ways to get both and hopefully after having looked at the architecture and performance of a number of popular web applications and optimized a couple, attendees will have a better appreciation for simple fast architectures and simple modular design techniques. And since there is no point in building fast and scalable applications if they aren’t secure, I’ll also cover architecting for security and go through the current state of XSS and CSRF security considerations that all Web developers should be familiar with. While parts of this talk is PHP specific, most of the concepts covered apply to all Web applications regardless of the language they are written in.

Derick Rethans has contributed in a number of ways to the PHP project, including the Xdebug debugging tool, the mcrypt, date and input-filter extensions, bug fixes, additions and leading the QA team. He's a frequent lecturer at conferences, the author of php|architect's Guide to Date and Time Programming, and the co-author of PHP 5 Power Programming. Derick works for eZ systems A.S. as project leader for the eZ components project and sits on their board of directors. In his spare time he likes to travel, hike, ski and practise photography.

In the past 12! years PHP has grown from Rasmus' "I want a web site counter" to a language that was unusable and then on to a language that is used in the most interesting places. In this presentation I will be going over all the phases that PHP has gone through, focussing on how the language, as well as the language communitys dynamics, changed. One of PHP's strengths has always been its low barrier-of-entry. It's also one of its weaknesses however. I will talk about the first steps of getting to know PHP, its community and developers. Of course times have changed now, and we are in the Web 2.0 era now, but the KISS principle still applies; for application design, for UI design and for server set-ups. I will also take you to the application development side of the KISS principle, with simpler architectures you can more easily make powerful complex applications.

Lorna Mitchell is a Senior Developer at Ibuildings, currently residing in the UK. Lorna has a masters degree in Electronic and Computer Engineering with experience using PHP, databases and server-side technologies in a variety of different business applications. She is a Zend Certified Engineer and the senior member for phpwomen.org in Europe.

Creating a great web service or API means enabling your users to do great things with the tools you give them - and they'll love you all the more for it. This session will show you how to build a elegant, useful web service. We'll look at the design choices to be made, the pitfalls in this area, and how to make a stable service that just works. This session is essential for architects and developers alike, whether you're already building services or are ready to begin, this will give you the grounding to do this well.

Lorenzo has a M.Sc. degree in Software Engineering and has been working with PHP and other languages for over 10 years. He's the lead maintainer of several PEAR packages (MDB2, Pager, Translation2...) and is a long time contributor to open source projects. He's also a researcher in the machine learning / NLP fields, and is generally interested in databases, algorithms and data structures. Currently he works as a Software Engineer at Ibuildings UK, helping high profile companies developing critical web applications.

In this talk I’m going to present the most used models (adjacency list, materialized path, nested sets) to represent a tree structure in a bi-dimensional table in the database. I’ll show the advantages as well the main pitfalls of each model, how to circumvent the described issues, and the queries to answer most of the relevant questions. Then I’ll introduce some more advanced models belonging to the nested intervals family (Binary Encoding, Farey algorithm, Continued Fractions and other encodings). Finally, I’ll show a proprietary solution (Oracle's CONNECT BY) and one of the SQL Standard's upcoming features, Common Table Expressions.

Kuassi Mensah is Group Product Manager, for Oracle Database Access and Programming Interfaces including Java, JDBC, OCI, PHP, Ruby, Python and Perl. He joined Oracle France in 1989 as system and database performance expert then took over the Centre of Expertise specializing in application architecture and database performance. In 1999, he moved to Oracle headquarters within the Oracle's Advanced Technology group. Mr Mensah holds a MS and post graduate in Computer Sciences from the Programming Institute of University of Paris VI. He is is a frequent speaker at industry events and has published several articles and a book on Java in the Database, JDBC, and Web Services. He maintains a blog @ http://db360.blogspot.com as well as a facebook and Twitter feeds.

PHP is the most popular scripting language for building Web Applications. How to build fast, scalable, and robust PHP web applications with Oracle? In this talk, you will learn how to take advantage of the performance and scalability mechanisms of the Oracle PHP driver, and the Oracle database including the Database Resident Connection Pool (DRCP), reducing roundtrips with stored procedures, scaling queries with cube-organized materialized view. The fastest database access is no database access. What are the PHP Caching strategies for Oracle Databases? This talk also shows how effective database caching strategies can be implemented using Oracle's caching mechanisms including Continuous Query Notification, client query result cache and in-memory database cache.

Erik is the CTO of Tuenti.com, the largest web property in Spain with over 20,000,000,000 pageviews per month. He is responsible for product development, engineering, and technical operations. His professional experience in PHP began while working for Facebook in 2004. In 2005, he co-founded Essembly.com – a political social network. He holds an A.B. in Computer Science from Harvard College, where his research focused on applying approaches from economics and neuroscience to AI algorithms.

AJAX has long been touted as a paradigm for creating cutting-edge UI. Few people understand that it can also be an important technology in building a scalable website. Tuenti is the largest web property in Spain, with over 20,000,000,000 pageviews/month. Our user experience is entirely AJAX-based - with no traditional HTML pageviews after login. From the product perspective, this enables videos to play and photos to upload while a user continues to browse the site. From the scalability perspective, the client-side AJAX engine can direct requests to webserver farms based on the type of request and provide robustness against server, farm, or network failure. In contrast to traditional architectures, we don't rely on expensive routers and load balancers in front of our farms to inspect incoming requests and determine which farm should handle them. We reduce internal network load by sending requests to farms that are near the caches and databases needed to build the response - improving response time and lowering costs. We also use our AJAX engine to collect metrics on the performance experienced by end-user for each request, providing insight into how our content and pages are being delivered to users across ISPs and CDNs. With this data, we detect failures and constraints in third-party systems - and work with those parties to correct or mitigate the effect of these problems on our users.

Lars Jankowsky (40) is working as CTO at Swoodoo GmbH and responsible for the PHP-based Flight Searchengine and also Technology Evangelist for OXID eSales AG. He is developing web applications for more than 15 years now and is using PHP since the early days. Besides software development the supervising of teams by eXtreme Programming is one of his passions.

After a short theoretical introduction into the Extreme Programming (XP) and Scrum, the two major flavours of agile development, we will work on an example web project using Extreme Programming. The workshop will cover the whole development cycle - from planning through setting up a continuous integration server with test framework, up to developing and shipping a web application with PHP. We will add new features incrementally in a test-driven way, covering the application with unit and acceptance tests, keeping it integrated and fully functional all the time. While working, we will exercise all main practices of XP, starting with Pair Programming, Simple Design, Test-Driven Development, Refactoring and finishing with Continuous Integration and Small Releases.

Stefan Koopmanschap is a long-term PHP developer as well as consultant and trainer. He is a community person and is active in the Benelux PHP community as secretary of the phpBenelux usergroup, as well as in the symfony community in various ways but mostly as a symfony advocate. Stefan has a wide history in Open Source, having been Support Team Leader for phpBB, documentation translator for Zend Framework and plugin developer and maintainer plus various other things for symfony. Stefan is also a best practices advocate. He prefers easy and useful explanations of best practices over the academic and theoretical stuff found in most literature.

Unlike popular belief it is not necessary to pick a single framework for a PHP project. On the contrary, it is quite easy to use more than one for your next project. The flexibility of PHP and the currently popular PHP frameworks allows an easy and close integration with eachother. During this presentation, you will get to see how to combine the best of both worlds into a single application of pure awesome by using a second framework on top of another when the first falls short.

Enrico Zimuel is a Senior Consultant at Zend Technologies in Italy. He is a Software Enginner since 1996 and he worked as Researcher in the field of XML Database at the Informatics Institute of the Amsterdam University (The Netherlands). He is the author of many articles and italian books about computer programming and security. Moreover he is the speaker of many PHP international conferences: ZendCon, PHPCon, PHPDay, etc. He is a Zend PHP 5 Certified Engineer and Zend Framework Certified Enginner and he has a B.Sc. honors degree in Computer Science and Economics from the University "G.D'Annunzio" of Pescara (Italy).

In this talk I will present the Zend_Cache class of the Zend Framework and some best practices to improve the performance of PHP applications. I will introduce the cache theory and the possible applications into the web development cycle. I will present the functions and the flexibility of the Zend_Cache with the use of the backends: File, Zend Server, Memcached, SQLite. Moreover I will provide some example codes and performance tests with and without the use of the Zend_Cache, to see the real benefits of the cache mechanism.

Hans Zaunere is a senior technologist with over 10 years experience advising, architecting, and implementing complex mission critical systems. Mr. Zaunere has provided strategic guidance and technical expertise in military, enterprise, medical, and start-up environments. Mr. Zaunere developed GPS and geophysical data gathering and analysis tools for government and private organizations, including the US Navy, FBI, NYSDEC, and Oceaneering International. Mr. Zaunere then designed and implemented the supporting network infrastructure to ensure the ongoing availability of these mission critical systems. Mr. Zaunere provided similar expertise as a Senior Technical Analyst for NYU Medical where he developed medical research, patient care, and financial reporting applications according to doctor requirements and strict HIPAA regulations. After moving to MySQL, Inc. as a Senior Engineer, Mr. Zaunere traveled worldwide to provide onsite solutions for start-ups and Fortune 500 enterprises. Mr. Zaunere is Managing Member, New York PHP, LLC where he manages a technical solutions team that services top-tier customers around the world. With high-traffic web site experience and best-practice development techniques, NYPHP provides unmatched service for cutting edge online properties under Mr. Zaunere's leadership. Mr. Zaunere is also a central figure in the technology community with numerous presentations and published articles.

Anyone involved in web application development over the last five years should be aware of the security ecosystem surrounding PHP. Often overhyped, sometimes dramatic, and always interesting, the topics of PHP and security are usually linked at the hip, and a favorite comedy topic for those involved with other languages. While PHP has made some security mistakes in the past, the focus of criticism is often misguided. The applicable codebase for the security notices - whether it be the PHP core, an extension, or an application - is forgotten and PHP as a whole gets one more strike. PHP also provides great power and flexibility. But with it, comes great responsibility. As with any application living on the internet, it's the entire support staff's responsibility architect, developer, and administrator - to ensure an application meets organization security requirements. In this talk, Hans Zaunere, Managing Member, New York PHP, provides tips, tricks, and fundamental best practices from the trenches for ensuring your code and LAMP deployment isn't caught off guard. He'll then review the PHP security ecosystem and available resources, debunk myths, and reveal some surprising facts that could leave you thinking PHP is one of the most secure languages available today.

Damien Seguy is leader of the Open Source Expertise Services, at Alter Way Group. Damien brings 10 years of experience to customers, in the field of security, architecture and performances. He helps promote PHP, MySQL and Free Software for compagnies and institutions. He is also co-author of the Zend Certifications, phather of the elePHPant plush toy.

PHP is now part of the normal tools at every IT department. Indeed, it must now cope with a raise in exigence and level of quality expected beyond it's famed scalability and fast development. What tools are needed to organize a large dev team and produce several hundreds of web site a year? Now is the time of industrialisation, where planning and organizing the code production must track bugs before publishing the code. We'll cover the tools and technics available to tame conception, production, publication and team work.

Kuassi Mensah is Group Product Manager, for Oracle Database Access and Programming Interfaces including Java, JDBC, OCI, PHP, Ruby, Python and Perl. He joined Oracle France in 1989 as system and database performance expert then took over the Centre of Expertise specializing in application architecture and database performance. In 1999, he moved to Oracle headquarters within the Oracle's Advanced Technology group. Mr Mensah holds a MS and post graduate in Computer Sciences from the Programming Institute of University of Paris VI. He is is a frequent speaker at industry events and has published several articles and a book on Java in the Database, JDBC, and Web Services. He maintains a blog @ http://db360.blogspot.com as well as a facebook and Twitter feeds.

Learn how developing high performance, functional web applications using the PHP scripting language and AJAX techniques is easy and productive. Use the latest OCI8 adapter with built-in Oracle Database 11g features, including DRCP connection pooling, to create scalable, secure applications. Learn how to scale database operations using binding, prefetching, caching, stored procedures. Learn how to access Oracle using the popular Zend Framework. Basic programming skills are assumed. Learn how to upgrade live Web applications using the brand new Edition-Base Redefinition in Oracle Database 11.2. There will be a special guest appearance by PHP ElePHPants looking for a new home.

Sebastian Bergmann holds a degree in computer science and is a long-time contributor to various PHP projects, including PHP. itself. He is the creator of PHPUnit and other Open Source tools that help developers develop better software. As a Co-Founder and Principal Consultant with thePHP.cc, Sebastian Bergmann offers consulting, training, and coaching services to help enterprises improve the quality assurance process for their PHP-based software projects. In his free time, Sebastian likes to hack on Open Source software and to take photographs, preferably while travelling the world.

More and more PHP developers know about quality assurance tools for PHP such as PHPUnit, PHP_CodeSniffer, PHP_Depend, and phpUnderControl these days. This presentation, given by the creator of PHPUnit, provides a high-level overview of the quality assurance tools landscape and shows how these tools work and can be combined for increased benefit.

Fabien Potencier is a serial entrepreneur. In 1998, right after graduation, Fabien founded his very first company with a fellow student. The company was a web agency focused on simplicity and Open Source technologies, and was called Sensio. His acute technical knowledge and his endless curiosity won him the confidence of many French big corporate companies. Fabien is the lead developer of the symfony framework. Today, Fabien's spends most of his time as Sensio's CEO and as the symfony project leader.

Symfony 2.0 is a major step forward for the symfony project. This new version introduces new concepts and make the framework even more decoupled and flexible. Moreover, the framework is more lightweight and much faster. This session will introduce you to the main new concepts of Symfony 2.

David Zuelke is the lead developer of the Agavi project, an open source MVC framework for PHP, and managing director at Bitextender GmbH, a Munich, Germany based software consulting and engineering company. He's been doing PHP development for ten years and occasionally can be bothered to post PHP-related stuff on his blog.

PHP has been shipping with ext/soap ever since version 5.0, and the extension has come a long way since in terms of features and compatibility. This talk will give a brief introduction to what SOAP is and how it works, and then show how to create SOAP clients and servers in PHP. We'll also examine some of the lesser known features of the extension such as type maps or SOAP header handling.

Damien Seguy is leader of the Open Source Expertise Services, at Alter Way Group. Damien brings 10 years of experience to customers, in the field of security, architecture and performances. He helps promote PHP, MySQL and Free Software for compagnies and institutions. He is also co-author of the Zend Certifications, phather of the elePHPant plush toy.

Nowadays, security is a major concern to Web appplications. Being the dominant language on Internet, PHP is now an obvious target for all kind of twisted tricks : developpers find it hard to keep up. However, with a simple change of point of view, there are ways to upgrade dramatically one's security. During this session, we'll present the common security problems that occurs with PHP / MySQL Web applications, and the defenses available to prevent them.

Davide Mendolia active member of Belgian PHP user group (PHPBelgium), I am currently consultant at Ausy as the job of Software Architect. And starting from October, I will be part of the front end team of Tuenti in Madrid. Having a good experience in the Web and enterprise domain, I contribute to php-benchmark and I'm lead developer on "Alternative PHP Monitor". This end of August I launched http://www.php-ci.net, a website offering hosting of continuous integration process for PHP applications.

With the growing use of PHP, today we have tools helping us to measures quality coming from Java world. This presentation will help you to harmonize the quality of your development. After unit testing, we now have the possibility to check the standard programming such as: File Formatting, Naming conventions and Coding Style. And also facilitate the choice of refactoring code by : Measuring the complexity of an application, class and even a function. Doing detection of copy / paste. At architectural level of an application, we can analyze an entire project and extract the software metric for determining the overall quality. At the end, automating the entire process in a continuous integration system is the final touch you can do.

Jan-Willem Eshuis is a PHP developer with a lot of experience on projects on a larger scale. As owner of JWE new media solutions he worked for company's like KPN, Vodafone and NOS. At the moment he's the technical coordinator at the New Media division of NOS the biggest news and sports broadcaster in the Netherlands.

PHP has become a real competitive and mature language for building websites and (web)applications today. Projects are getting more complex and are build in larger teams with programmers all over the world. In his talk about "Clean Coding" in PHP/Zend Framework he speaks about various aspects to create better, more efficient and maintainable code in your PHP projects to ensure the future of the created websites and (web)applications.